Comment by ignostic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignostic | Hacker News Reader

The premise here doesn't support the hypothesis. We start out talking about Facebook apps, and it makes sense. The name of a game, when it appears on a timeline, is far more compelling than the brand names. If you're trying to sell a product, you need to get the product in front.

Here's where things start to break down. People don't look for meetups in their apps - they look for meetups online. No one looks for a "SF singles app." They don't even go to the appstore for that - they go to Google. And despite the fact that I pulled this term out of a hat, guess who's first in Google for "SF singles meetup"? Meetup.com.

The second reason this doesn't apply - meetup isn't selling a SF singles app like a company sells a game. They're selling a platform to help people organize. By putting the app name in front, they put the product in back.

Honestly I think the fragmentation of apps would be a mess, and that it would ultimately result in lower visibility, awareness, and traffic figures for meetup.com as the meetups themselves become the brand.

You cannoy simply assume that a branding strategy/architecture that worked in one case will work as well for a different product or industry. Sometimes umbrella/family branding is the way to go.

You're right, and the reason why you're right is pretty interesting. Meetup.com's business model is built around charging meetup organizers and building the relationships between organizers and participants. So Meetup's interest is to form a lasting relationship with it's users with the aim of converting them to organizers; and single purpose distribution of apps for individual meetups doesn't help that.

I would say that the OP is looking at the wrong metric for meetup's business model; it's not mobile traffic that counts, it's contacts per user per month[1] that tells meetup whether they're succeeding at building lasting relationships.

1. This would actually be a weighted moving average of the last three months and another of the past year. Obviously, not the only metric in play.

I don't think the argument is focused on what Meetup should do, but what they could do if new user acquisition were a priority. It's a growth tactic that can be balanced with retention and engagement approaches, that Meetup right now understands and is heavily investing in.

Taking this approach also doesn't mean you'd have to go full throttle. You could test and decrease the pace by only allowing a segment of quality organizers the ability to create their own app.

Nothing wrong with an umbrella approach - I'd argue it's likely that Meetup cares a lot more about retention and engagement, and cross-selling other high-quality events, than any type of acquisition at this point. Users bring in other users through word of mouth is a pretty compelling approach.

That being said, if they wanted to open up their new user acquisition efforts on mobile they could let users brand and launch their own applications in addition to their main app.

They could do it in the same way you're becoming more able to customize a meetup landing page now, and tuck promotion of other similar events, or even the main meetup app in the background.

This type of approach could appeal to organizer who really cares about their own brand. Think large conferences and related topics, who'd love to use a Meetup backend, but need to differentiate their brand.

On the search point would you agree that someone searching for "soccer" in the iOS store would be interested in an app dedicated to doing soccer in person?

(Disclaimer: I am the author of the article)

I disagree - I believe people have an intimate enough relationship with certain meetup groups that they work as a micro-social network. To that end, it would make logical sense to have an independent application for those groups.

With that said, this strategy would not be an alternative to having a central Meetup.com application - this strategy would work in conjunction primarily to leverage the additional app store SEO boost from having thousands of unique titles. Each individual application would link right back to Meetup.com's primary application and people would have to sign up for a Meetup.com account in order to use it.

With that said, there are shortcomings to this approach. This empowers group organizers a little more than Meetup.com would ideally like and might work better for companies that white-label their services.

I still don't doubt that it will greatly increase raw traffic numbers - but maybe thats not what their priority is at the moment.

>"I disagree - I believe people have an intimate enough relationship with certain meetup groups that they work as a micro-social network. To that end, it would make logical sense to have an independent application for those groups."

But what does that do for meetup.com, except cut themselves off completely from the very communities they're trying to foster?

>"to leverage the additional app store SEO boost from having thousands of unique titles."

You only get the "SEO boost" if people are actually looking for terms on a search engine. You're still assuming that people are actually looking for local interest group on the app store. I really don't think so.

If anyone were serious about it, one could run a quick survey and ask where users would search if they wanted to find a local group to talk about shared interests. I'd be surprised if more than 1 in 500 said anything like "app store".

>" still don't doubt that it will greatly increase raw traffic numbers"

I feel like a jerk, now, and I don't mean to be, but I also have to disagree here. I don't see how cutting Meetup out of the equation amounts to more traffic for Meetup.com.

I think the fundamental difference between our points of view is that I am attributing traffic on each individual application to be contributing to Meetup.com's traffic.

Each individual application is still owned by Meetup, it runs their application binary executing their advertisements, running on their payment processing, cross-promoting whatever content it is that they want to promote - what difference does it make if the application is called New York Tech instead of Meetup.com?

I think one difference is that they will recommend New York Tech to their tech friends, rather than recommend a general system for meeting people with shared interests to all of their friends.

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